Phoenard, A Prototyping Gadget

November 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

The Hackaday Prize party wasn’t just about the five finalists; actually, there were more THP entries in attendance – All Yarns Are Beautiful, OpenExposer, M.A.R.S., a 3D scanner, and a few more that I’m forgetting – than actual finalists. In addition, a number of people brought projects that had never seen the light of day, like [Ralf] and [Pamungkas]’ Phoenard.

Phoenard is a Kickstarter project the guys launched at the prize party, something they could attend as a little side trip after manning the ‘maker’ part of the Atmel booth at Electronica. They’ve come up with a tiny handheld device that can only be described as a ‘gadget’. It has a touchscreen, a battery, an MegaAVR, a few connectors, and not much else. What makes this project cool is how they’re running their applications. A bootloader sits on the AVR, but all the applications – everything from a GSM phone to an MP3 player – lives on a microSD card.

The Phoenard guys have come up with a few expansion modules for Bluetooth LE, GSM, GPS, and all the usual cool modules. Plugging one of these modules into the back of the device adds capability, and if that isn’t enough, there’s an old 30-pin iPhone connector on the bottom ready to accept a prototyping board.

Video of these guys below.

Continue reading “Phoenard, A Prototyping Gadget” →

A breakdown of the various parts of the Game Tin

Game Tin: Handheld Games With No Batteries

October 16, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 54 Comments

Anyone who grew up with a Game Boy knows how well they sucked through AA batteries. [Nick]’s Game Tin console solves this problem by running of an ultracapacitor charged by solar power.

The console is based on a EFM32 microcontroller: an ARM device designed for low power applications. The 128×128 pixel monochrome memory display provides low-fi graphics while maintaining low power consumption.

There’s two solar cells and a BQ25570 energy harvesting IC to charge the ultracap. This chip takes care of maximum power point tracking to get the most out of the solar cells. If it’s dark out, the device can be charged in about 30 seconds by connecting USB power.

The 10 F Maxwell ultracapacitor can run a game on the device for 1.5 hours without sunlight, and the device runs indefinitely in the sun. Thanks to the memory display, applications that have lower refresh rates will have much lower power consumption.

The Game Tin is open source, and is being developed using KiCad. You can grab all the EDA files from Bitbucket. [Nick] is also gauging interest in the Game Tin, and hopes to release it as a kit.

Kruger’s Zippo Remote

August 23, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 25 Comments

FWHLN99HZ2IV5DF.MEDIUM

Inspired by the detonator in the Captain America: The First Avenger movie, [Jon] modified a normal Zippo lighter to activate a relay on a receiver module. His instructables shows how to create such a device by adjusting the insert in such a way that if someone flipped it open, all they would see would be a flint wheel, flint, wick, and all that stuff; nothing would be abnormal. In order to do this, the components would have to be perfectly concealed.

To acquire a remote signal, [Jon] used the whole metal case as an antenna instead of replacing the wick with one. An antenna pin on an RF module was attached to the insert to get the necessary effect. The flint wheel was then turned into a button and a notification LED was installed. Once the code was uploaded and a receiver module was fashioned together, the end product produced a flash of sparks on the other end.

This hack was made for educational use, and is only meant for demonstration purposes.

Continue reading “Kruger’s Zippo Remote” →

Reverse Engineering A GPS Watch To Upload Custom Firmware

August 10, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 25 Comments

Sometimes GPS watches are too good to be left with their stock firmware. [Renaud] opened his Kalenji 300 GPS watch, reverse engineered it in order to upload his own custom firmware.

The first step was to sniff the serial traffic between the PC and the microcontroller when upgrading firmware to understand the protocol and commands used. [Renaud] then opened the watch, figured out what the different test points and components were. He used his buspirate with OpenOCD to extract the existing STM32F103 firmware. The firmware helped him find the proper value to store in a dedicated register for the boot loader to start.

By looking at the disassembly code he also found the SPI LCD initialization sequence and discovered that it uses a controller similar to the ST7571. He finally compiled his own program which uses the u8glib graphics library. Follow us after the break for the demonstration video.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering A GPS Watch To Upload Custom Firmware” →

An Open Source 1MHz Arbitrary Waveform Generator With An Awesome UI

August 9, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 15 Comments

[Herp] just shared a nice 1MHz Arbitrary Waveform Generator (right click -> translate to English as google translation links don’t work) with a well designed user interface. His platform is based around a PIC32, a TFT module with its touchscreen and the 75MHz AD9834 Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS). Of course the latter could generate signals with frequencies up to 37.5MHz… but that’s only if two output points are good enough for you.

As you can see in the video embedded below, the ‘tiny dds’ can generate many different kinds of periodic signals and even ones that are directly drawn on the touchscreen. The offset and signal amplitude can be adjusted using several operational amplifiers after the DDS ouput and a separate SMA TTL output is available to use a PIC32 PWM signal. The platform can read WAV audio files stored on microSD cards and also has an analog input for signal monitoring. Follow us after the break for the video.

Continue reading “An Open Source 1MHz Arbitrary Waveform Generator With An Awesome UI” →

Pocket Calculator Emulates Pocket Calculator

July 2, 2014 by Adam Fabio 35 Comments

msp430 Calc Emu

[Chris] has built a pocket calculator that emulates… a pocket calculator. Two pocket calculators, in fact. Inspired by [Ken Shirriff’s] incredible reverse engineering of the Sinclair scientific calculator, [Chris] decided to bring [Ken’s] Sinclair and TI Datamath 2500II simulators to the physical world.

Both of these classic 70’s calculators are based on the TMS0805 processor. The 0805 ran with 320 11-bit words of ROM and only three storage registers. Sinclair’s [Nigel Searle] performed the real hack by implementing scientific calculator operations on a chip designed to be a four function calculator.

[Chris] decided to keep everything in the family by using a Texas Instruments msp430 microcontroller for emulation. He adapted [Ken’s] simulator code to run on a MSP430G2452. 256 bytes of RAM and a whopping 8KB of flash made things almost too easy.[Chris’] includes ROMs for both the TI and the Sinclair calculators. The TI Datamath ROM is default, but by holding the 7 key down during boot, the Sinclair ROM is loaded. The silk screen includes key icons for both calculators, as well as some Doge-inspired wisdom on the back.

All joking aside, these really are amazing little calculators. Children of the 60’s and 70’s will be taken back when they see the LEDs flash as the emulated TMS0805 performs algorithmic arithmetic. [Chris’] code is up on Github. While he hasn’t released gerbers yet, he does have images of his PCB layout on the 43oh.com forums.

Continue reading “Pocket Calculator Emulates Pocket Calculator” →

A Masterpiece Of 3D Printed Case Modding. With An Ouya.

April 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

We’ve seen a few of [Downing]’s portabalized console builds before, but this one is his first build in over two years. That’s a lot of time, and since then he’s picked up a lot of great fabrication techniques, making this one of the best looking portables we’ve ever seen. It’s a repackaging of an Ouya, but we won’t hold that against him, it’s still an amazing piece of work.

In the build log, [Downing] started off this build by using a 3D printed enclosure, carefully milled, filled, and painted to become one of the best one-off console repackagings we’ve ever seen. The speaker and button cutouts were milled out, and an amazing backlit Ouya logo completes the front.

Stuffing the Ouya controller inside a case with a screen, battery, and the console itself presented a challenge: there is no wired Ouya controller. Everything is over Bluetooth. Luckily, the Bluetooth module inside each controller can be desoldered, and slapped on a small breakout board that’s stuffed in the case.

It’s a great build, and in [Downing]’s defense, the Ouya is kinda a cool idea. An idea much better suited to a handheld device, anyway. Videos below.

Continue reading “A Masterpiece Of 3D Printed Case Modding. With An Ouya.” →